Old-school coder living in a 2.0 development world.

Menu

Tag Archives: 01011001

After almost four years, Arjen Anthony Lucassen released the new Ayreon album, 01011001. My guess is that Arjen decided this would be the album that would connect all Ayreon stories, from the blind minstrel to the last migrator. And it does. Unfortunately, from a musical stand point, the album fails to deliver anything impressive.

The songs are completely unimaginative. Sometimes, when not paying attention to the lyrics, I thought I was hearing some other Ayreon album. The same rhythm, the same sounds… nothing new. And when Hansi Kürsch sings, it really feels like you are listening to Blind Guardian, not Ayreon (in contrast, when Mike Baker sung in “The Human Equation”, you didn’t feel like listening to Shadow Gallery. And I would dare to say that when James LaBrie sung in the same album, it also didn’t feel like Dream Theater.)

So far, I would say that’s the weakest of all the albums. But who knows, maybe that was the idea, to give people some context for the next album…

So, first I didn’t understand why Amazon MP3 was available globally. Then I bought I MacBook and start using the iTMS and thought “now I can have anything I want.”

Yesterday, for some stupid reason, I decided to change the country in the iTMS listing. Why? Well, for a long time I’m waiting for “Edguy – Scarecrow” and “Ayreon – 01011001” to show up, but none of those are available. So I changed the store to Germany and guess what? There they are. “Ok, I’ll buy them now, then. I don’t care paying in euros.” Well, the thing is, you can’t buy things that are not available in your account country.

And that’s something that really annoys me. In one hand, you have all the major record companies complaining about piracy and, in the other, they make things harder to get if you’re not in one of the major countries. The greatest failure of the record companies is not realizing that this thing called “internet” actually works in the whole planet, not just some countries.